profile

Design Current

🔥 What we learned: Crafting AI products that stick

Published 8 months ago • 1 min read

From Hype to Habit: Crafting AI Products that Stick

Thanks for joining our event!

We had a great time last night - with an inspiring discussion, 2 lucky raffle winners, and plenty of great conversations.

Missed the event?

See event recording here: 🎥 Link
Get our UX guide for trustworthy AI products: 👉 Link​
​

Here’s a quick recap of the highlights.

Key Takeaways

1. Make sure you are solving real, specific problems

  • Don’t lead with the tech - start with the user’s pain point
  • Successful AI products target recurring, concrete needs

2. AI Shines in “fuzzy” problem spaces

  • It's best suited for tasks that don’t require 100% precision ​
  • Great for summarization, suggestions, categorization, prototyping
  • Not ideal for high-stakes, exact-output tasks

3. It's still important to keep humans in the loop

  • Use AI for the repetitive, not the irreplaceable
  • Humans shine in nuance, creativity, and taste
  • Example: curating new trends, strategic decision-making

4. Ask yourself, how should this AI product make users feel?

  • Expect users to be skeptical to AI, so it's important to build trust
  • Prioritize: guidance, education, control, feedback, and personalization

5. Time savings ≠ compelling value (alone)

  • Many AI products emphasize their time-saving benefits
  • But they underdeliver. Users rarely care about saving 5 minutes
  • It's important to tie time savings to money, output, or impact

How to design for trust in AI

We created a guide with 10 essential UX patterns to design for trust in your AI product.

Books and podcast recs

We asked attendees to give us book and podcast recommendations. Here are the top mentions:

  • 🎙️ Acquired
  • 🎙️ Lenny’s Podcast
  • 🎙️ Work Life
  • 🎙️ Hidden Brain
  • 📖 Give and Take

NYC recs

We also asked attendees to tell us cool NYC spots they recommend:

  • 🪩 Nowadays
  • 🍺 Von Bar
  • 🍲 Wayan
  • 🎵 Public Records
  • 📚 Rooftop at NYPL

The event was brought to you by Koi Studios, Brooklyn Product Design, and BrainStation.

​

Hope to see you again in the future!

Anyi & Andrea

Cofounders @ Koi Studios​

​

P.S., we run a newsletter at Koi Studios with UX gems and best practices. You can subscribe here.

​

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

​

​

Design Current

by Koi Studios

Subscribe to get UX strategies, design trends, and real-world examples to help you build better products.

Read more from Design Current

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. In this issue, we want to share a few design inspirations and thought pieces that has helped us grow and reflect. First, a celebration! Our studio has just entered our 4th year! We started Koi Studios with a simple belief: thoughtful design can do good. What began as a desire to create impactful work grew into a studio built around care: for users, partners, and the problems worth solving. Fast forward to...

about 18 hours ago • 2 min read
Side-by-side comparison of two mobile money transfer screens: a baseline prompt design with bold cards and multiple payment options, and a front-loaded prompt design with cleaner layout, clearer hierarchy, and additional details like fees and estimated ar

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. Over the past few months, we've been exploring how to better incorporate Figma Make into our design workflow at Koi Studios. But then, I quickly realized: If the output quality I'm getting from my prompt is bad, it doesn't matter where I use it in my design process, because it's useless. So I started researching best practices for prompting Figma Make. The top tip: front-load your prompt If you’ve looked...

16 days ago • 3 min read
A blue page titled “Understanding Neural Networks, Visually,” featuring a colorful neural network diagram with connected nodes.

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. And to those celebrating: Happy Thanksgiving! ✨ As a little gift of gratitude, we pulled together a handful of design gems our team at Koi Studios fell in love with this year. They sparked a ton of inspiration for us, and we hope they do the same for you. Design candy Understand neural network visually → Epic visual storytelling that turns a complex topic into something truly digestible. Poolsuite → An...

3 months ago • 1 min read